Laws that will make it illegal to create online sexual images of someone without their consent are coming into force soon in the U.K., officials said Thursday, following global backlash over the use of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok to make sexualized deepfakes of women and children.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer welcomed measures xAI announced late Wednesday to prevent Grok from allowing the editing of photos of real people to portray them in revealing clothing in places where that is illegal. Starmer said X must “immediately” ensure full compliance with U.K. law, adding that his government will remain vigilant on any transgressions by Grok and its users.
“Free speech is not the freedom to violate consent,” Starmer said Thursday. “I am glad that action has now been taken. But we’re not going to let this go. We will continue because this is a values argument.”
The chatbot, developed by Musk’s company xAI and freely accessed through his social media platform X, drew scrutiny after critics said it was used in recent weeks to generate thousands of images that “undress” people without their consent. The images included nude depictions as well as portrayals of women and children in bikinis or in sexually explicit poses.
The controversy also prompted the U.K.’s media regulator to open an investigation into whether X breached U.K. laws over Grok-generated images involving children being sexualized or people being undressed. Ofcom said such images—and similar productions made by other AI models—may amount to pornography or child sexual abuse material.
The issue, officials said, was linked to the launch last year of Grok Imagine, an AI image generator that lets users create videos and pictures by typing text prompts and includes a so-called “spicy mode” that can generate adult content. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall cited a report from the Internet Watch Foundation that, she said, found the deepfake images included sexualization of 11-year-olds and women subjected to physical abuse.
Kendall said, “The content which has circulated on X is vile. It is not just an affront to decent society, it is illegal.”
The U.K. said it is fast-tracking legal provisions in the Data (Use and Access) Act to make it a criminal offense to create or request deepfake images. The legislation is set to come into effect on Feb. 6, and Justice Secretary David Lammy said the change would send a message to perpetrators “hiding behind a screen,” warning that they “will face the full force of the law.”
Separately, the government said it is criminalizing “nudification” apps as part of the Crime and Policing Bill, which is currently going through Parliament. Kendall said the new criminal offense will “target the problem at its source,” by making it illegal for companies to supply tools designed to create non-consensual intimate images.
Ofcom’s investigation remains ongoing. Kendall said X could face a fine of up to 10% of its qualifying global revenue, depending on the investigation’s outcome, and a possible court order blocking access to the site. Starmer has faced calls for his government to stop using X, and Downing Street said this week it was keeping its presence on the platform “under review.”
Musk, for his part, insisted Grok complied with the law. He posted on X that, when asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle for Grok is to obey the laws of any given country or state. Musk also wrote: “There may be times when adversarial hacking of Grok prompts does something unexpected. If that happens, we fix the bug immediately.”