Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their clothing.
Several instances have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer reactions or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying likenesses of people in a pornographic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
