Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant outrage after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification technology. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for allowing users to produce images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
