Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their garments.
Several instances have emerged where the system has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
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 give commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to generate pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
