The social media platform X has caused major anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of generating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
