Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by removing their clothing.
Multiple instances have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to offer reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying likenesses of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
