Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major anger after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by stripping their attire.
Several instances have emerged where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for allowing users to produce images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of creating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
