Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous examples have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to give commentary or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to create pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of making graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
