Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant anger after people used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of women by removing their attire.
Several instances have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to produce photos and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
