Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to provide commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for allowing users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying likenesses of people in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
