Elon Musk's online network X has sparked widespread backlash after users utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by removing their clothing.
Numerous cases have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to create images and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
