Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant anger after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their garments.
Several examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of generating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
