Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused widespread backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous cases have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to offer commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been condemned for enabling users to create photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making graphic material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
