Ofcom has made “urgent contact” with Elon Musk’s social media platform X over “serious concerns” its in-built artificial intelligence can be used to generate “undressed images of people and sexualised images of children”.
Since the start of the new year, X users – mainly women – have reported that accounts have used the artificial intelligence tool Grok to generate images of them without clothing.
There are also several cases where Grok has created sexualised images of children, according to analysis by news agency Reuters.
Ofcom said in a statement on Monday that it had made “urgent contact” with X and xAI – the artificial intelligence company behind Grok and owned by Mr Musk – and will assess whether “there are potential compliance issues that warrant investigation”.
“We are aware of serious concerns raised about a feature on Grok on X that produces undressed images of people and sexualised images of children,” the online regulator for safety said.
“We have made urgent contact with X and xAI to understand what steps they have taken to comply with their legal duties to protect users in the UK.
“Based on their response, we will undertake a swift assessment to determine whether there are potential compliance issues that warrant investigation.”
It comes after X owner Mr Musk said in a post on Saturday that “anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content”.
Elon Musk. Pic: AP
A statement shared on the social media platform’s official Safety account said: “We take action against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary.”
A post on the Grok X account previously said there had been “isolated cases where users prompted for and received AI images depicting minors in minimal clothing. “xAI has safeguards, but improvements are ongoing to block such requests entirely,” it added.
Under the Online Safety Act, it is illegal to share, or threaten to share, intimate photos or videos of someone – including deepfake images – without their permission.
The act, which became law last July, also requires social media firms to prevent and remove child sexual abuse material when they become aware of it.
AI images ‘can do quite a lot of damage’, says expert
Speaking to Sky News about the use of Grok to generate images of women undressed, a cybersecurity expert has highlighted a lack of “international, treaty-level agreement on how we’re going to handle AI”.
Charlotte Wilson, head of enterprise at global firm Check Point, said: “You look how accessible some of these toolkits are, they’re like what we used to see with malware and phishing toolkits – where from a really low point of entry, you can do quite a lot of damage to an individual, a brand reputation, a group of people. And [AI image generation] disproportionately impacts women.”
“We don’t seem to have a global, international, treaty-level agreement on how we’re going to handle AI,” she continued. “You’ve got the US looking to handle it one way, you’ve got the EU trying to regulate separately.
“Other than being able to go and seek the criminal through whatever market and find out who did it and taking that person down, I don’t see us collaborating [on policing deepfakes] globally.”
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It comes after French ministers reported sexually explicit content generated by Grok on X to prosecutors on Friday, saying in a statement that the “sexual and sexist” content was “manifestly illegal”.
The ministers said they had also reported the content to French media regulator Arcom for checks on whether it complied with the European Union’s Digital Services Act.
