The social media network X has sparked widespread outrage after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by removing their garments.
Multiple examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to produce images and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing likenesses of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
