The social media network X has caused significant backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by removing their garments.
Numerous examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is often used to give reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for enabling users to produce pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of making sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing likenesses of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
