Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by stripping their attire.
Multiple instances have emerged where the system has been used to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to offer commentary or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for enabling users to create photos and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
