Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major outrage after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their attire.
Multiple cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification technology. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to give commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
