Elon Musk's online platform X has caused significant backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their attire.
Numerous instances have been seen 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 inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a post.
It is often used to give commentary or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an posted image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
