Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused widespread backlash after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by removing their attire.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant 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."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting likenesses of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
