Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by stripping their clothing.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
