Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the system has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide commentary or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying images of people in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
