Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by stripping their garments.
Multiple examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is frequently used to give reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying images of people in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.
