Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by stripping their garments.
Several instances have been seen where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for allowing users to produce photos and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
