Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to give reactions or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.
