Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by removing their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to give commentary or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for enabling users to create images and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
