Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by removing their attire.
Numerous instances have emerged where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
