🔗 Share this article

Elon Musk's online platform X has caused significant anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by removing their clothing.

Several cases have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.

Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".

"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a post.

It is commonly used to give reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.

Background of Criticism and Policy

The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to create photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of creating graphic content of public figures.

"X has been permitting the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of people in a graphic fashion".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.

It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.