Elon Musk's online platform X has caused significant backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by stripping their attire.
Numerous examples have emerged where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to give commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
