Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant anger after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by removing their garments.
Several cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to offer reactions or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and spread of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
