The social media platform X has provoked major backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by removing their garments.
Multiple instances have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to provide commentary or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to create photos and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of people in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
