Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant anger after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is often used to give commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for permitting users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
