Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by removing their clothing.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping software. 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 forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide commentary or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for allowing users to produce pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
