Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant backlash after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by stripping their attire.
Numerous examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to give reactions or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to produce pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of generating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing likenesses of persons 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 clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
