Elon Musk's social media network X has caused significant anger after users utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by removing their attire.
Multiple cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
