The online network X has caused significant anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
