Elon Musk's online platform X has caused significant anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by stripping their garments.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been condemned for permitting users to create images and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing 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," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
