Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major backlash after users used its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by taking off their attire.
Multiple examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
