Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by stripping their clothing.
Several examples have been seen where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for allowing users to create pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and spread of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
