Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked widespread outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their attire.
Numerous instances have been seen where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making graphic 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 not witnessed any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying likenesses of people in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
