Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change images of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple instances have surfaced where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing images of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
