The online platform X has caused significant anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by stripping their clothing.
Several examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to give commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing images of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
