Elon Musk's online network X has caused major anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by removing their garments.
Several instances have surfaced where the tool has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate photos and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
