The social media platform X has sparked significant anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by taking off their clothing.
Several cases have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok 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 Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to produce pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
