The social media network X has provoked significant anger after people used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by stripping their attire.
Numerous cases have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of making graphic material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
