Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of females by removing their clothing.
Several instances have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for allowing users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
