Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by removing their garments.
Numerous cases have emerged where the technology has been used to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to generate images and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
