Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by removing their garments.
Multiple cases have emerged where the technology has been used to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to create photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
