Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by taking off their attire.
Multiple cases have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost 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 reactions or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted image through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying images of people in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
