Elon Musk's online network X has provoked major anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by removing their attire.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been used to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to offer reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for allowing users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing 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 acceptable use policy bans "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
