Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of women by taking off their attire.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "showing likenesses of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
