Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their garments.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been used to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to offer commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted image through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for permitting users to produce images and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying images of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
