Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple instances have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification software. 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 abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to create pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
