The social media platform X has sparked major backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by removing their clothing.
Multiple instances have been seen where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to generate pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of making graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
