The social media network X has sparked major backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by removing their clothing.
Several instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to generate photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
