Elon Musk's online platform X has caused significant anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by stripping their clothing.
Multiple instances have surfaced where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted photo through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to create pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
