Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their attire.
Multiple instances have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to provide commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing likenesses of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.
