Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by removing their clothing.
Several cases have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to create pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
