The online platform X has caused significant anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Several instances have surfaced where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
