The social media network X has sparked major backlash after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by stripping their garments.
Numerous examples have emerged where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of individuals in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
