Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant backlash after users used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their garments.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
