Elon Musk's social media network X has caused widespread anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the system has been used to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
