Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the system has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to give commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
