Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused widespread anger after users used its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their garments.
Numerous examples have emerged where the technology has been used to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been condemned for enabling users to produce images and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
