Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major anger after users used its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of women by removing their garments.
Multiple cases have been seen where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of making sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
