Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by removing their garments.
Numerous examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to produce pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of people in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
