Elon Musk's online network X has sparked major backlash after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted image through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to create pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of generating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
