Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by stripping their clothing.
Numerous examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for allowing users to generate images and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of generating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
