Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by stripping their garments.
Numerous instances have emerged where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to give reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to produce photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting likenesses of people in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
