Elon Musk's social media network X has caused widespread outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their garments.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the tool has been used to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for allowing users to create photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
