Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by stripping their attire.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is often used to offer reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
