Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by stripping their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the system has been used to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide reactions or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
