The social media platform X has caused major backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by stripping their clothing.
Multiple instances have surfaced where the system has been used to digitally undress female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to give commentary or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of creating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing images of people in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
