Elon Musk's online platform X has caused major anger after people used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an posted image through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to create pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
