Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of females by removing their clothing.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the technology has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been condemned for allowing users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
