Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by stripping their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to generate images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
