Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked major backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by stripping their clothing.
Several cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the creation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying likenesses of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.
