Elon Musk's online network X has sparked major backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by stripping their garments.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
