The online network X has provoked widespread outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by removing their attire.
Multiple examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to provide reactions or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been condemned for allowing users to produce pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
