Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major backlash after people used its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by taking off their attire.
Several instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been faulted for allowing users to generate images and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of generating graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of people in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
