Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their garments.
Several cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been condemned for allowing users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
