Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked widespread backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their attire.
Several cases have emerged where the technology has been used to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to create photos and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and spread of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying images of persons in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
