Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by removing their attire.
Numerous cases have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce images and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of making graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
