Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused widespread backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by stripping their attire.
Numerous examples have emerged where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to offer commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for allowing users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and spread of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
