The social media platform X has caused major anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by stripping their attire.
Several instances have been seen where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for enabling users to generate photos and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of making graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing likenesses of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
