The social media platform X has provoked widespread backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by removing their attire.
Several cases have emerged where the system has been used to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to give commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The system has been criticised for allowing users to produce pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
