Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major backlash after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their garments.
Several cases have surfaced where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing likenesses of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
