The online platform X has provoked significant anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of females by taking off their garments.
Multiple instances have been seen where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been faulted for allowing users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting likenesses of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
