Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major outrage after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by removing their attire.
Multiple examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for allowing users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
