Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major outrage after users used its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to produce images and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
