Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked widespread backlash after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by stripping their garments.
Numerous examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is often used to offer commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
