Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked major backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple examples have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
