Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by stripping their attire.
Multiple examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to create images and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
