🔗 Share this article

Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by removing their garments.

Several instances have been seen where the tool has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.

Company Reaction and Regulatory Position

XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an standard response stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".

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

Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.

Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.

It is commonly used to offer reactions or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.

History of Controversy and Rules

The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of public figures.

"X has been permitting the creation and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own terms of service bans "showing images of people in a graphic fashion".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.