Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major backlash after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by removing their clothing.
Numerous instances have been seen where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of making inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing images of people in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
