Elon Musk's online network X has sparked major anger after people used its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by taking off their clothing.
Multiple instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, other than an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
