Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by stripping their attire.
Numerous instances have been seen where the tool has been used to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a post.
It is often used to provide reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
