Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major anger after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of females by stripping their attire.
Several instances have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
