Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by taking off their garments.
Several examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for allowing users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying images of people in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
