Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after people used its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Numerous cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the creation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
