Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by stripping their garments.
Multiple cases have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
