Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major backlash after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their attire.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying likenesses of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
