Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by stripping their garments.
Numerous examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of generating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
