Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major backlash after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their garments.
Several cases have surfaced where the system has been used to digitally undress women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to produce pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying likenesses of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
