Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by removing their attire.
Multiple examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for permitting users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing likenesses of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
