Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major backlash after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by stripping their clothing.
Several instances have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to give commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been condemned for enabling users to create pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
