Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their attire.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.
It is often used to provide commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to create photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of making graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
