Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by removing their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost 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 background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to generate photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of people in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
