Elon Musk's online network X has sparked widespread anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is often used to give reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to produce photos and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
