Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked widespread outrage after users used its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their attire.
Multiple examples have been seen where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to give reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
