Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant outrage after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by removing their garments.
Several cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to produce photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
