Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by removing their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the tool has been used to digitally undress women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted image through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been condemned for enabling users to produce images and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing likenesses of persons in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
