Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
