The online platform X has provoked widespread anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their attire.
Multiple instances have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to produce photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of generating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
