Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by taking off their attire.
Multiple instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to create pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
