Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by taking off their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the tool has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
