Elon Musk's social media network X has caused significant backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their clothing.
Multiple cases have emerged where the system has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"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 Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for allowing users to create images and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
