The social media network X has sparked major anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous instances have emerged where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to create images and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
