Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by stripping their clothing.
Multiple examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to create pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
