Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of females by stripping their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been used to digitally undress women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to create images and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
