The online platform X has caused significant anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by removing their garments.
Several cases have been seen where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of making inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
