Elon Musk's social media network X has caused significant anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by stripping their clothing.
Numerous cases have emerged where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to create photos and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
