Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous instances have emerged where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying likenesses of individuals in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
