Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant anger after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by removing their clothing.
Several instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying images of people in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
