Elon Musk's online platform X has caused widespread anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by removing their clothing.
Several examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent 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 ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to produce photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
