Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked widespread outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of making graphic content of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing likenesses of individuals in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
