Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread backlash after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by stripping their attire.
Multiple examples have been seen where the technology has been used to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to generate images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
