Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by taking off their clothing.
Multiple cases have been seen where the system has been used to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to produce images and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of persons in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
