The social media network X has provoked widespread outrage after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by removing their garments.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
