Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by removing their attire.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been criticised for permitting users to produce pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
