Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their garments.
Several instances have surfaced where the tool has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
