Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread outrage after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to give commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
