Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant anger after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their garments.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the tool has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to give reactions or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of creating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of individuals in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
