The online network X has provoked significant backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by stripping their clothing.
Numerous cases have emerged where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted photo through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to produce photos and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of generating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
