Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant outrage after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by stripping their clothing.
Numerous examples have emerged 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 sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to create photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
