Elon Musk's social media network X has caused widespread anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous cases have emerged where the system has been used to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to create images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of making sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
