Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked major outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by taking off their attire.
Multiple instances 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 sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to create images and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing likenesses of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
