Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by removing their garments.
Multiple cases have been seen where the technology has been used to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to create images and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.
"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 challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
