Elon Musk's online network X has caused major backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Numerous examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to create pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
