Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by taking off their garments.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the creation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
