The social media network X has provoked major outrage after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by taking off their garments.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for permitting users to produce images and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of making graphic material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
