Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of women by stripping their attire.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been faulted for allowing users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting likenesses of persons in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
