The social media platform X has provoked significant outrage after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the system has been used to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to give commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
