The online platform X has sparked significant backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by stripping their clothing.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.
