Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The system has been criticised for permitting users to create images and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
