Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous instances have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to create photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying likenesses of persons in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
