Elon Musk's online network X has caused major backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their attire.
Multiple cases have emerged where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce images and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of making graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of people in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
