Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by removing their attire.
Multiple examples have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
