The online platform X has sparked significant backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by stripping their clothing.
Several instances have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to give reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to produce pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing images of individuals in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
