Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant outrage after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by stripping their clothing.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the technology has been used to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they wanted 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 "evaluate the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to give reactions or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an posted image through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for allowing users to produce photos and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
