Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant anger after users used its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous instances have been seen where the technology has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to create images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of people in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
