Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major anger after users used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by removing their attire.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
