Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major backlash after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by removing their garments.
Numerous instances have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
