Elon Musk's online platform X has caused major backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple cases have emerged where the system has been used to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give reactions or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of generating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
