The social media network X has caused major backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of females by stripping their clothing.
Several cases have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
