The social media platform X has caused significant anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by removing their clothing.
Numerous examples have emerged where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to create pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of generating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the generation and spread of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
