Elon Musk's online platform X has caused significant anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been criticised for permitting users to create pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
