Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant anger after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of females by stripping their clothing.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to offer commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to produce pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
