Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major anger after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by removing their garments.
Numerous cases have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.
