The online network X has caused widespread anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by stripping their clothing.
Multiple instances have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer reactions or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
