Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous instances have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of making graphic material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
