Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by removing their clothing.
Multiple examples have emerged where the tool has been used to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
