Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant backlash after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their attire.
Several instances have surfaced where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for permitting users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making graphic content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
