Elon Musk's social media network X has caused widespread outrage after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by stripping their garments.
Multiple examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been condemned for permitting users to create images and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
