The social media platform X has sparked major backlash after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of women by removing their attire.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to give commentary or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been condemned for permitting users to create photos and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
