Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their garments.
Numerous instances have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to offer reactions or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for allowing users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
