Elon Musk's online network X has caused widespread outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by removing their clothing.
Several cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to create pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
