Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major anger after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their garments.
Several instances have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for allowing users to create pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
