Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant backlash after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of women by stripping their garments.
Several instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
