Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by removing their garments.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the technology has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to provide commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been condemned for permitting users to generate pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of generating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of people in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
