Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked major backlash after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the tool has been used to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to provide reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to generate pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
