Elon Musk's online network X has caused widespread outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by stripping their attire.
Multiple cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, other than an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
