Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant outrage after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by taking off their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of persons in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified 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 viewing illegal material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
