Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major outrage after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their garments.
Multiple instances have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give reactions or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for enabling users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation 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 usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
