The online platform X has provoked major backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for permitting users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
