Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by stripping their attire.
Several cases have emerged where the system has been used to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to create pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.