Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their attire.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to create photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
