Elon Musk's social media network X has caused widespread backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by removing their attire.
Multiple cases have been seen where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing likenesses of people in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.
