Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of females by removing their garments.
Several examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
