Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant anger after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by stripping their garments.
Several instances have emerged where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of generating graphic material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
