Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread outrage after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by taking off their clothing.
Multiple instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, other than an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for enabling users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
