Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major backlash after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their attire.
Numerous cases have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
