Elon Musk's social media network X has caused significant anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by taking off their attire.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the system has been used to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for permitting users to generate images and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of people in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
