Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant outrage after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous instances have been seen where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to produce photos and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
