The online platform X has sparked major anger after people used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse 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 "assess the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give commentary or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been condemned for permitting users to produce photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
