Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by removing their clothing.
Several examples have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for enabling users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "showing images of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
