Elon Musk's social media network X has caused significant anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of females by removing their attire.
Numerous examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of generating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
