The social media network X has sparked widespread backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their garments.
Numerous cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to produce images and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
