The online platform X has caused widespread outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by removing their garments.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to give commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for permitting users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of individuals in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
