Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by taking off their clothing.
Multiple cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to give commentary or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of making sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
