Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused widespread anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for permitting users to create images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
