Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major backlash after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to produce pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of persons in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
