Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of females by removing their clothing.
Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to create pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the creation and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
