The social media platform X has sparked significant anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their garments.
Several examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to generate photos and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of generating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
