Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by taking off their attire.
Numerous cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit image stripping software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been condemned for enabling users to produce images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and spread of these images 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 forbids "showing images of people in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
