Elon Musk's online network X has provoked significant anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of women by taking off their attire.
Several examples have been seen where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.
