The social media platform X has sparked major backlash after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by removing their clothing.
Multiple cases have been seen where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to provide commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for allowing users to create pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
