Elon Musk's online network X has caused widespread anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by stripping their attire.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to produce images and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
