Elon Musk's online platform X has caused major anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by stripping their garments.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to give commentary or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for permitting users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
