The social media platform X has sparked major backlash after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by stripping their clothing.
Several examples have been seen where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to produce images and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
