The social media network X has provoked widespread backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of females by removing their garments.
Numerous examples have been seen where the tool has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
