Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant backlash after users used its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of women by taking off their garments.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to give reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing images of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
