The online platform X has caused significant anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by removing their attire.
Several examples have been seen where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to give commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to produce photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "showing images of persons in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
