Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by removing their clothing.
Numerous instances have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of individuals in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
