Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major outrage after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by taking off their attire.
Several instances have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been faulted for enabling users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying images of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
