Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by stripping their attire.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The system has been condemned for enabling users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of making graphic material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
