The social media platform X has caused major anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by removing their garments.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to give reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for allowing users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
