Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their garments.
Numerous examples have emerged where the technology has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The system has been criticised for enabling users to generate photos and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of generating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
