Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous instances have emerged where the system has been used to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to create photos and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making graphic content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
