Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by taking off their garments.
Multiple cases have emerged where the system has been used to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to offer reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to produce pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
