Elon Musk's online network X has provoked significant anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by taking off their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of making graphic content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
