Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked widespread backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by stripping their garments.
Numerous examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been faulted for permitting users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
