The social media platform X has provoked major anger after people used its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their clothing.
Multiple examples have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
