Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by taking off their attire.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The system has been faulted for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of generating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
