Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread anger after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the technology has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
