Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major outrage after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Several cases have emerged where the technology has been used to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of generating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of people in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
