Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by removing their clothing.
Multiple cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people viewing unlawful material 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 chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
