Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant outrage after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by stripping their clothing.
Numerous cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The system has been faulted for allowing users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying images of persons in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
