Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by removing their attire.
Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
