Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of women by removing their clothing.
Numerous cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw nudification technology. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to produce pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the creation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of persons in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
