Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to create pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying images of persons in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
