The social media network X has sparked significant backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by removing their clothing.
Multiple instances have been seen where the system has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of people in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
