🔗 Share this article

Elon Musk's online network X has caused major backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their clothing.

Multiple examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.

Developer Response and Legal Position

XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and significant fines".

"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a post.

It is commonly used to give commentary or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.

Background of Criticism and Rules

The tool has been criticised for enabling users to create pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate material of public figures.

"The platform has been permitting the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.

XAI's own usage rules bans "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit manner".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.

It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.