Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by stripping their garments.
Numerous examples have been seen where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to give reactions or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
