Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by removing their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping software. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been faulted for enabling users to produce photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of making sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.
