Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their clothing.
Numerous instances have been seen where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for allowing users to produce images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of making graphic content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing images of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
