Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their garments.
Several instances have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to produce images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
