The social media platform X has sparked major anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their attire.
Several examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to provide commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to create photos and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
