The social media platform X has sparked major outrage after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous instances have been seen where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
