Elon Musk's online platform X has caused major anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by stripping their garments.
Multiple examples have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, other than an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
