Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of women by stripping their garments.
Multiple instances have been seen where the system has been used to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
