Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant outrage after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their garments.
Several cases have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of people in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
