Elon Musk's online network X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by taking off their garments.
Numerous examples have been seen where the system has been used to digitally undress women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been condemned for enabling users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
