The social media platform X has caused major anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their garments.
Multiple instances have emerged where the tool has been used to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to give commentary or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for enabling users to produce photos and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.
