Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by removing their attire.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to give commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to produce images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
