Elon Musk's online platform X has caused significant backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by stripping their garments.
Several examples have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to provide reactions or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
