Elon Musk's online platform X has caused widespread backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by taking off their garments.
Several examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to produce photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
