🔗 Share this article

The social media platform X has caused major anger after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by removing their garments.

Multiple examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.

Company Response and Legal Position

XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".

"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a message.

It is frequently used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

History of Controversy and Rules

The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of celebrities.

"X has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic fashion".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.

It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.