The social media platform X has provoked major anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their garments.
Several instances have emerged where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been condemned for permitting users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing likenesses of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
