Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their garments.
Multiple examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide reactions or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
