Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Numerous examples have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The system has been condemned for permitting users to produce photos and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of persons in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
