The online platform X has sparked widespread anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming 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 misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to produce photos and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
