Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by removing their garments.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to give reactions or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying likenesses of persons in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
