Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their garments.
Multiple instances have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to generate pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
