Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major backlash after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by removing their attire.
Multiple cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop 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 risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is frequently used to give commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to create pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of people in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
