The social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after people used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their garments.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for allowing users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of creating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing likenesses of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
