Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Several cases have been seen where the system has been used to digitally undress female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
