The social media network X has provoked widespread outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by taking off their garments.
Multiple instances have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to produce pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
