Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by stripping their garments.
Multiple examples have emerged where the tool has been used to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to give commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to produce photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
