Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their clothing.
Numerous cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing likenesses of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
