The online platform X has caused widespread anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by taking off their attire.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, other than an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for permitting users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
