Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant anger after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by stripping their clothing.
Numerous cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The system has been faulted for permitting users to create images and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
