Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked widespread outrage after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by removing their garments.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to produce images and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
