Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major outrage after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by taking off their clothing.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"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."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to create photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
