Elon Musk's online platform X has caused major anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of women by stripping their clothing.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to create pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing images of people in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
