Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant anger after people used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by stripping their clothing.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the system has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification technology. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
