Elon Musk's social media network X has caused widespread outrage after people used its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous examples have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of generating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created 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 remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
