The social media platform X has provoked significant outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by removing their clothing.
Several cases have been seen where the system has been used to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been faulted for enabling users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying likenesses of people in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
