Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for permitting users to generate pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing likenesses of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
