Elon Musk's online network X has caused significant anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by stripping their garments.
Several instances 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 sexualized situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to create photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
