The social media platform X has sparked significant backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for permitting users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
