Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by stripping their clothing.
Multiple cases have been seen where the technology has been used to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to generate images and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying likenesses of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.
