Elon Musk's social media network X has caused significant backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their attire.
Several instances have surfaced where the tool has been used to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for permitting users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
