Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant anger after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
