Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by removing their garments.
Multiple examples have emerged where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for allowing users to create photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the production and spread of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of persons in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
