Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Several examples have emerged where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of people in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
