Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked widespread outrage after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of females by stripping their attire.
Several cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to provide reactions or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to produce photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of persons in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
