Elon Musk's online network X has sparked widespread outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their attire.
Numerous examples have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to provide reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to create photos and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
