Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their garments.
Several examples have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted image through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to generate pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
