Elon Musk's online network X has provoked widespread anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by stripping their clothing.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
