Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their attire.
Multiple instances have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a post.
It is often used to provide commentary or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for allowing users to produce photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making graphic material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
