Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major outrage after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by stripping their garments.
Several instances have emerged where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to provide reactions or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for permitting users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
