Elon Musk's online platform X has caused widespread backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by taking off their clothing.
Several instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to give commentary or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate images and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
