Elon Musk's social media network X has caused widespread anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
