Elon Musk's online platform X has caused widespread anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by taking off their attire.
Numerous examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution 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 usage rules prohibits "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
