The social media platform X has caused significant anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by removing their garments.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying likenesses of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
