Elon Musk's online network X has caused major outrage after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of females by stripping their garments.
Several instances have emerged where the technology has been used to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
