The online platform X has provoked widespread outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by stripping their attire.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to create pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying images of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
