The social media platform X has provoked major anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their clothing.
Multiple cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
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 proposed to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to give reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to create photos and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
