Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the creation and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
