Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by stripping their garments.
Multiple cases have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for allowing users to generate pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
