Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant outrage after people used its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by removing their clothing.
Numerous instances have emerged where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to give reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
