The social media platform X has sparked widespread backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of women by removing their clothing.
Multiple examples have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to generate pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
