Elon Musk's social media network X has caused widespread outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by stripping their garments.
Several examples have been seen where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can alter an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to create images and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
