Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked widespread outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by removing their garments.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been condemned for allowing users to generate pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
