Elon Musk's online network X has caused major anger after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their attire.
Several instances have been seen where the system has been used to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to give reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted photo through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for allowing users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying likenesses of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
