Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to produce pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of people in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
