Elon Musk's online platform X has caused major backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by removing their attire.
Several cases have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been condemned for allowing users to generate pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of generating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of people in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
