🔗 Share this article

The social media network X has caused widespread backlash after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by taking off their attire.

Several cases have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.

Developer Response and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw image stripping software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".

"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.

It is frequently used to provide commentary or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.

History of Controversy and Policy

The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to create pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.

"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.

It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.