Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by taking off their attire.
Multiple cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to generate photos and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
