Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant backlash after people used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by stripping their attire.
Several instances have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, 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 chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to generate pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
