Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major backlash after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by removing their attire.
Numerous examples have emerged where the system has been used to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for permitting users to produce pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of individuals in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
