Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread outrage after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by stripping their garments.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been faulted for allowing users to create pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making graphic material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and stated this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
