The Union government on Friday wrote to social media platform X, directing it to identify and remove sexually explicit content generated by its artificial intelligence chatbot Grok, ANI reported.

The Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology told X to “undertake a comprehensive technical, procedural and governance-level review” of Grok to ensure that it does not generate content that contains nudity or sexually explicit material.

The Centre warned the social media platform that not complying with the directive could lead to action against its officials under the Information Technology Act, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, ANI reported.

In the letter to X’s chief compliance officer in India, the Union government said that users were misusing Grok to create fake accounts to generate and share obscene photos and videos of women with the intent of denigrating them.

“Importantly, this is not limited to creation of fake accounts but also targets women who host or publish their images or videos, through prompts, image manipulation and synthetic outputs,” the ministry said.

Hosting or publishing obscene and sexually explicit content, including through AI-enabled tools, is invasive of bodily privacy and attracts serious penal consequences, the Centre said.

The government also directed X to submit an action taken report within 72 hours, detailing the measures undertaken to oversee the Grok application, the oversight exercised by the chief compliance officer, the action taken against offending content and the mechanisms put in place to comply with mandatory reporting requirements, ANI reported.

Earlier in the day, Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) MP Priyanka Chaturvedi wrote to Union Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, urging him to take up the matter with X.

She said that such artificial intelligence-generated images are unacceptable and constitute “gross misuse of an AI function”.

“This is breach of women’s right to privacy as well as unauthorised use of their pictures, which is not just unethical but also criminal,” Chaturvedi said in the letter to Vaishnaw.