Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by removing their garments.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying likenesses of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
