The online platform X has sparked significant backlash after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their attire.
Multiple cases have emerged where the technology has been used to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to create pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
