Elon Musk's social media network X has caused significant backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their garments.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the tool has been used to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is often used to provide reactions or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to create images and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
