Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked widespread anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their garments.
Multiple examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to offer reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been condemned for enabling users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying images of persons in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
