Elon Musk's online network X has provoked significant anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Several cases have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of generating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of people in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
