Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused widespread backlash after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Several instances have surfaced where the technology has been used to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for allowing users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
