The social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their garments.
Multiple instances have surfaced where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
