Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major outrage after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their attire.
Numerous examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is frequently used to give reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for permitting users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
