Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by removing their garments.
Several cases have surfaced where the system has been used to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for permitting users to create photos and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
