Elon Musk's online platform X has caused significant anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Multiple examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, 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 upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to give commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for allowing users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of persons in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
