Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by removing their garments.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the system has been used to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "face 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 "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to produce pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
