Elon Musk's online network X has sparked major backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by stripping their garments.
Numerous cases have been seen where the tool has been used to virtually strip female subjects to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for allowing users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
