Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been condemned for permitting users to generate pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
