🔗 Share this article

The social media network X has provoked widespread anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by taking off their clothing.

Multiple cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.

Company Reaction and Legal Stance

XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".

"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.

It is often used to offer reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted photo through its AI image editing function.

History of Criticism and Policy

The tool has been faulted for enabling users to produce photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.

"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.

XAI's own terms of service bans "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit manner".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.

It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.