Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major anger after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Several cases have emerged where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing images of people in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
