The social media platform X has caused widespread anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to generate pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
