Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Numerous cases have been seen where the tool has been used to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to create images and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and spread of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
