The social media platform X has provoked major anger after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by taking off their attire.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
