Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by removing their attire.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the system has been used to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to create photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
