Elon Musk's online network X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to give commentary or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to generate photos and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
