Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused widespread outrage after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their garments.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to give commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of generating graphic material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
