The social media platform X has provoked significant anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of females by taking off their clothing.
Several instances have surfaced where the system has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
