Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant outrage after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their attire.
Several cases have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to provide commentary or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce photos 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 permitting the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying images of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
