The social media platform X has caused widespread backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to create images and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing 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 usage rules prohibits "showing likenesses of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
