Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread outrage after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Several cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of generating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
