Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to give commentary or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been condemned for permitting users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying likenesses of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
