Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread backlash after users utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Numerous instances have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer reactions or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to create pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of creating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying images of people in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
