Elon Musk's online platform X has caused major anger after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of females by removing their clothing.
Multiple instances have emerged where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
