Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their attire.
Multiple instances have surfaced where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The system has been condemned for allowing users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing images of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
