Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by removing their attire.
Multiple examples have been seen where the system has been used to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to generate photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
