Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to generate images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
