Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant outrage after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous cases have been seen where the system has been used to virtually strip women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been criticised for enabling users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
