Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by stripping their garments.
Several instances have been seen where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "showing images of individuals in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
