Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant anger after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of women by taking off their garments.
Several examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to produce pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of making graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.
