The social media platform X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by removing their attire.
Multiple cases have been seen where the technology has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification technology. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in 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 yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of individuals in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
