Elon Musk's online network X has provoked widespread backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by stripping their clothing.
Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and spread of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting likenesses of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
