Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked major anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by taking off their garments.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for allowing users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the creation and spread of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
