The online platform X has provoked major anger after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of making inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
