The social media platform X has provoked major backlash after people used its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their attire.
Several cases have surfaced where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to create photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
