Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by stripping their garments.
Several cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog 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 relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to create images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of persons in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
