Elon Musk's online platform X has caused significant anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by removing their attire.
Several examples have been seen where the system has been used to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to create photos and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of persons in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
