The Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Modifies Photographs of Women to Digitally Remove Their Clothes
The online network X has caused significant backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their garments.
Multiple cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban image stripping tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for permitting users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of persons in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
