Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of women by removing their clothing.
Several cases have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to offer reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the creation and spread of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing likenesses of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
