Elon Musk's social media network X has caused significant backlash after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an posted photo through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to produce photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying images of persons in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
