Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused widespread anger after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by removing their clothing.
Several cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining 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 message.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate photos and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of people in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
