The online network X has provoked significant anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to provide commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to generate images and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of creating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
