Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major anger after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their clothing.
Several examples have been seen where the technology has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to produce photos and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of people in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
