The social media platform X has provoked widespread anger after people used its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Several cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to provide commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been faulted for permitting users to generate pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
