The social media platform X has provoked major anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by removing their clothing.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to create images and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
