Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple examples have been seen where the system has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give commentary or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying images of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
