Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant outrage after people used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit image stripping software. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to give commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can alter an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for permitting users to produce images and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing likenesses of people in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
