Elon Musk's online network X has provoked major anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by taking off their garments.
Numerous cases have emerged where the technology has been used to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
