The social media platform X has provoked major anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by removing their garments.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting images of persons in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
