Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant outrage after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous examples have been seen where the system has been used to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for allowing users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of people in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
