Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread backlash after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by stripping their garments.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for allowing users to produce photos and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying likenesses of people in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.
