Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by taking off their attire.
Multiple instances have emerged where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to generate photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
