Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant backlash after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by taking off their garments.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
