Elon Musk's online network X has provoked major anger after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by taking off their garments.
Numerous cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for allowing users to produce images and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
