Elon Musk's online network X has caused significant outrage after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of women by removing their attire.
Several cases have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of generating graphic material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.
