The online network X has sparked major backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their garments.
Numerous cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
