The social media network X has provoked major backlash after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Several cases have surfaced where the tool has been used to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer commentary or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the creation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing likenesses of people in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
