Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused widespread anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of women by removing their attire.
Multiple cases have been seen where the system has been used to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to offer reactions or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.
