Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread anger after people used its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their clothing.
Multiple cases have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to give reactions or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to create photos and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
