Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by removing their garments.
Numerous instances have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been faulted for permitting users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of persons in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
