Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their clothing.
Several instances have surfaced where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, 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 faulted for allowing users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
