Elon Musk's social media network X has caused widespread backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by taking off their attire.
Several cases have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to produce photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
