The social media platform X has sparked major backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by stripping their clothing.
Several cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to give commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for allowing users to produce photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
