Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked widespread outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by removing their attire.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for permitting users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
