The social media platform X has sparked major outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by removing their garments.
Numerous instances have emerged where the tool has been used to virtually strip female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a post.
It is often used to give reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
