Elon Musk's online network X has sparked widespread anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by taking off their attire.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to create pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of generating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
