Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by stripping their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of people in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
