The social media platform X has provoked significant backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Several instances have surfaced where the tool has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to produce images and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of individuals in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
