The social media platform X has sparked significant anger after people used its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of women by removing their garments.
Numerous instances have emerged where the tool has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of making sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of persons in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
