The social media platform X has provoked major anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by removing their clothing.
Multiple instances have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose 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 potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give reactions or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to create pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of persons in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
