Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by removing their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to provide commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to create photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying images of persons in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
