The social media platform X has sparked widespread backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by removing their clothing.
Multiple instances have been seen where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of generating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing likenesses of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
