Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by taking off their clothing.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit nudification tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted photo through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
