Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of women by taking off their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of people in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
