The social media platform X has caused significant anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their attire.
Numerous instances have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
