The Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Changes Images of Women to Digitally Remove Their Clothes

The online network X has provoked major anger after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of women by removing their garments.

Numerous instances have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.

Company Response and Legal Position

XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".

"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."

Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm 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 features—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a post.

It is often used to provide reactions or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.

History of Controversy and Policy

The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce photos and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.

"X has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.

It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.