Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by taking off their garments.
Several instances have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been faulted for allowing users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of people in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
