Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Numerous cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and spread of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
