Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by stripping their garments.
Multiple cases have been seen where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing likenesses of people in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.
