Elon Musk's online network X has caused significant outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by stripping their garments.
Several examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to offer commentary or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
