The social media platform X has sparked significant anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by stripping their clothing.
Numerous cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to produce images and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.
