🔗 Share this article

Elon Musk's online network X has sparked major backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by removing their clothing.

Several cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.

Company Response and Legal Stance

XAI, the organization responsible for 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 proposed to prohibit nudification tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".

"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.

It is frequently used to offer commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

History of Criticism and Rules

The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to generate photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating graphic content of celebrities.

"The platform has been permitting the generation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit way".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.

It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.