Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by removing their clothing.
Numerous cases have emerged where the system has been used to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.
