Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked widespread outrage after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of women by removing their garments.
Multiple instances have been seen where the technology has been used to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce images and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
