Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by taking off their attire.
Several instances have surfaced where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for allowing users to produce pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit 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 terms of service forbids "showing images of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
