The online platform X has sparked major anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by taking off their garments.
Several examples have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying images of persons in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
