Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major backlash after users utilized its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their attire.
Numerous cases have emerged where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been condemned for allowing users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
