Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by taking off their garments.
Several cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to give commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for permitting users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
