Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant outrage after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of females by stripping their garments.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit nudification tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The system has been faulted for allowing users to generate images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
