The online platform X has provoked significant anger after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by removing their clothing.
Numerous examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
