Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their garments.
Multiple examples have emerged where the tool has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to give commentary or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to create pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
