Elon Musk's online platform X has caused significant anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by stripping their garments.
Several cases have emerged where the technology has been used to virtually strip female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to produce images and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
