Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major anger after users utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to generate pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
