The social media platform X has caused widespread outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by stripping their attire.
Several cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to provide reactions or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to produce pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
