Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant outrage after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by stripping their clothing.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying likenesses of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
