The social media platform X has provoked major anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing likenesses of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
