Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for enabling users to produce photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
