Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major outrage after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by removing their clothing.
Multiple instances have emerged where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for allowing users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing images of persons in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
