The social media platform X has sparked significant anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple cases have emerged where the system has been used to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to create pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying likenesses of persons in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
