Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked widespread outrage after people used its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by removing their clothing.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been faulted for enabling users to produce photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying images of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
