The social media network X has caused widespread anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of females by removing their attire.
Multiple examples have been seen where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to produce images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
