Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major backlash after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by removing their clothing.
Numerous cases have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been condemned for allowing users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
