Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their attire.
Multiple examples have emerged where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide commentary or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to create photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
