The social media platform X has provoked major backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of females by stripping their attire.
Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to give reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting images of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
