Elon Musk's online platform X has caused widespread backlash after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of females by taking off their attire.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The system has been faulted for permitting users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of generating inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
