Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major backlash after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change images of women by removing their attire.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been used to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention 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 distribute private pictures or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
