Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant outrage after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of females by taking off their garments.
Several cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
The system has been condemned for permitting users to produce photos and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting 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 clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
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