Elon Musk's online network X has caused significant backlash after people used its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their clothing.
Numerous cases have emerged where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to create photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
