Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by stripping their garments.
Multiple instances have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to produce photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing likenesses of people in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
