Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked widespread backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Multiple cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit nudification tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly 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 artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
