Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused widespread backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by taking off their clothing.
Multiple cases have been seen where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for allowing users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying images of persons in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
