Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Several instances have emerged where the system has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to generate images and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of making graphic material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
