Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of females by removing their clothing.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to create images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
