Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have been seen where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
