🔗 Share this article

Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by stripping their attire.

Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been used to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.

Developer Response and Regulatory Position

XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".

"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."

Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a message.

It is often used to give reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.

Background of Criticism and Rules

The tool has been criticised for allowing users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate material of public figures.

"X has been allowing the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.

It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.