Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by removing their garments.
Multiple cases have emerged where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted 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 sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
