Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant backlash after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of women by removing their garments.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing images of individuals in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
