The online platform X has provoked significant anger after users utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by stripping their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to offer commentary or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to produce photos and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
