Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread backlash after people used its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of females by stripping their attire.
Multiple cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to create images and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying likenesses of persons in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
