Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by removing their garments.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
