Elon Musk's online platform X has caused significant backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by stripping their clothing.
Several cases have surfaced where the tool has been used to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit image stripping software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for allowing users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
