Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant anger after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Numerous examples have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to produce photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of generating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying likenesses of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
