Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by taking off their attire.
Numerous cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted image through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
