Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by removing their clothing.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
