Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by stripping their attire.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for allowing users to produce photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of making graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of individuals in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
