Elon Musk's online network X has provoked significant anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their garments.
Several cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted photo through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing likenesses of individuals in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
