Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant outrage after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their garments.
Several examples have been seen where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
