The social media platform X has caused major backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by stripping their attire.
Several cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to produce images and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying likenesses of individuals in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
