The social media network X has caused widespread anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by stripping their garments.
Several cases have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to create pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the creation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
