The social media platform X has sparked widespread backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their clothing.
Several instances have emerged where the system has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to give commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted image through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The system has been condemned for enabling users to create pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of persons in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
