Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major outrage after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by stripping their clothing.
Several instances have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to give reactions or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of making graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
