Elon Musk's online network X has sparked significant anger after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of women by stripping their garments.
Multiple cases have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for allowing users to generate pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
