The online platform X has provoked widespread anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by stripping their clothing.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to generate photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
