Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by taking off their garments.
Several examples have emerged where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to give commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to produce photos and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the creation and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.
