Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major outrage after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by removing their clothing.
Numerous cases have emerged where the tool has been used to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
