Elon Musk's online network X has sparked significant anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of females by removing their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to provide commentary or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to produce pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.
