Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by taking off their garments.
Several instances have emerged where the system has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of people in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
