Elon Musk's online platform X has caused major outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
