The social media network X has caused widespread backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by removing their attire.
Numerous cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an posted photo through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
