Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major outrage after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by stripping their attire.
Several instances have been seen where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to produce photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of generating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
