The social media network X has provoked major outrage after people used its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by removing their garments.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or additional context to other users' comments, 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 generate photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
