The online platform X has sparked widespread anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their attire.
Several cases have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to generate photos and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and spread of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying images of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
