Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread backlash after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their garments.
Numerous instances have emerged where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to provide reactions or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
