Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their clothing.
Multiple cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
