Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by stripping their clothing.
Several instances have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to give reactions or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been condemned for enabling users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
