Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by stripping their clothing.
Several examples have surfaced where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted photo through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
