The social media platform X has caused significant backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Multiple instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to give commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for allowing users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of individuals in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
