The online platform X has provoked widespread anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by stripping their clothing.
Numerous cases have been seen where the tool has been used to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been condemned for permitting users to produce photos and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.
