Elon Musk's online network X has caused significant anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Several instances have emerged where the tool has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to provide reactions or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
