Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by removing their attire.
Several examples have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to give reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been faulted for enabling users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of making inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
