Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major anger after users used its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by removing their attire.
Numerous examples have been seen where the system has been used to digitally undress female subjects to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for allowing users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting likenesses of persons in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
