The social media platform X has sparked widespread backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by removing their garments.
Several instances have surfaced where the system has been used to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to offer commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
