Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have emerged where the system has been used to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been faulted for permitting users to produce photos and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing images of people in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
