Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by removing their clothing.
Several instances have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to produce pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
