Elon Musk's online network X has provoked significant anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have emerged where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the creation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
