Elon Musk's online network X has sparked significant backlash after people used its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by removing their garments.
Multiple instances have surfaced where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to create pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
