Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major backlash after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by removing their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted image through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "showing images of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
