Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their garments.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate images and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of people in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
