Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major outrage after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by stripping their garments.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to provide reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to create images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
