Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their garments.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for enabling users to generate images and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of creating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production 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 acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
