Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their garments.
Numerous instances have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of creating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
