The social media platform X has provoked significant anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by removing their attire.
Numerous instances have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for permitting users to create images and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of generating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
