Elon Musk's social media network X has caused significant anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of persons in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
