Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread outrage after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by stripping their clothing.
Multiple examples have emerged where the tool has been used to virtually strip female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to produce photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
