The social media platform X has provoked major backlash after people used its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their garments.
Several cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
