Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant backlash after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by stripping their garments.
Numerous examples have been seen where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for enabling users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
