Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by taking off their garments.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly 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 tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to create photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
