Elon Musk's online network X has provoked major anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by taking off their garments.
Multiple cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and spread of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
