Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by removing their clothing.
Several cases have been seen where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting 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 accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to generate pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying likenesses of people in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
