Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their clothing.
Several instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been condemned for allowing users to create photos and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
