Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked widespread anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by removing their attire.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the tool has been used to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of making inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing images of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
