The social media network X has caused significant anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by stripping their garments.
Numerous cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been condemned for enabling users to produce photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing likenesses of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
