Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant anger after people used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of women by removing their attire.
Several instances have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
