Elon Musk's online network X has provoked significant anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous instances have emerged where the system has been used to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for permitting users to produce pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of making graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing likenesses of individuals in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
