Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant outrage after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous examples have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to generate images and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
