Elon Musk's online network X has caused major anger after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their attire.
Several cases have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing likenesses of people in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
