Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Numerous cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to create photos and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the production and spread of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
