Elon Musk's social media network X has caused significant backlash after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
