Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by stripping their garments.
Several cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit image stripping software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to produce photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of making graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
