Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by removing their garments.
Multiple cases have been seen where the technology has been used to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing likenesses of persons in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and stated 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 encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
