Elon Musk's online network X has sparked significant backlash after users utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their clothing.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
