🔗 Share this article

The social media platform X has sparked significant backlash after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by taking off their attire.

Several cases have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.

Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position

XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".

"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.

It is commonly used to provide commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.

History of Controversy and Rules

The system has been criticised for permitting users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.

"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of individuals in a sexually explicit way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.

It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.