Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by stripping their attire.
Numerous examples have been seen where the tool has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is often used to offer commentary or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
