Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused widespread anger after people used its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous cases have been seen where the system has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to create photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
