Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread outrage after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by removing their garments.
Several instances have surfaced where the system has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to produce photos and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of people in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
