Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major backlash after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by stripping their attire.
Multiple instances have emerged where the system has been used to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can alter an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing images of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
