Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by stripping their clothing.
Numerous instances have been seen where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to generate images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of persons in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
