The online platform X has provoked widespread anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by removing their attire.
Numerous cases have emerged where the tool has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to give reactions or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to create pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
