Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by removing their clothing.
Several examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to give commentary or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to generate pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of generating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
