Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of women by taking off their garments.
Several examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to produce images and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
