The social media network X has provoked significant anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by removing their attire.
Several cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying likenesses of individuals in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
