Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their garments.
Numerous cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been condemned for allowing users to produce photos and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of creating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
