The online platform X has sparked widespread anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the system has been used to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of making graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of individuals in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
