Elon Musk's online network X has sparked significant outrage after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their clothing.
Multiple cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated 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 often used to provide commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting likenesses of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.
