Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by stripping their garments.
Several cases have surfaced where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of making inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
