The online platform X has sparked significant backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Several cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to generate images and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
