Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant backlash after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by stripping their garments.
Several cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to create photos and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
