Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their garments.
Several cases have surfaced where the system has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for permitting users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
