The social media platform X has sparked major anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their garments.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to provide commentary or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an posted image through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to create pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
