Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by stripping their attire.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to produce photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
