Elon Musk's online network X has caused significant backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by removing their garments.
Several examples have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to create images and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of people in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
