Elon Musk's social media network X has caused widespread backlash after people used its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by stripping their clothing.
Several instances have emerged where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been condemned for enabling users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
