Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to provide commentary or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for permitting users to produce images and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
