Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major anger after people used its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by removing their attire.
Multiple instances have emerged where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of generating graphic material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing images of people in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
