Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by removing their clothing.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to give reactions or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of making graphic content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of people in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
