Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their garments.
Several cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to produce photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying likenesses of persons in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
