Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by stripping their attire.
Numerous examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification technology. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to create pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of making graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
