The social media platform X has sparked widespread outrage after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by taking off their attire.
Multiple examples have been seen where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been condemned for enabling users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the creation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
