Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by removing their clothing.
Numerous instances have emerged where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to offer reactions or more 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 Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of creating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
