Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their garments.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for permitting users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of making graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing likenesses of people in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.
