Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by removing their clothing.
Several cases have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to create pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.
