The social media network X has provoked significant outrage after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by stripping their attire.
Numerous examples have emerged where the system has been used to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of persons in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
