The online network X has provoked widespread outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by stripping their attire.
Numerous cases have emerged where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to create photos and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying images of people in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
