Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by stripping their garments.
Several instances have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"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 tech firms must "consider the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to create images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
